


We'll Work On It

by downjune



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Casual Sex, M/M, Not Very Casual Emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-09-26 18:30:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17146871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: “He totally hates me. So that’s great.” Matt shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweats and twitched his shoulders so his bag settled more comfortably against his back. Next to him Rusty scoffed.“Tanger doesn’t hate you, come on. That’s just his face. He looks at everybody like that.”





	We'll Work On It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sparcck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparcck/gifts).



> Based on this [juicy little nugget!](https://minisuke87.tumblr.com/post/178367091571/pens-win-final-score-pens-7-3-cbj)
> 
> Happy Hockey Hols, sparcck!

“He totally fucking hates me. So that’s great.” Matt shoved his hands into the pockets of his sweats and twitched his shoulders so his bag settled more comfortably against his back. Next to him Rusty scoffed, the sound echoing in the parking garage as they walked to their cars after morning skate. 

“Tanger doesn’t hate you, come on. That’s just his face. He looks at everybody like that.”

Matt opened his mouth to point out how clearly false that was, but Rusty cut him off. “Okay, he looks at all us kids like that. And the Washington Capitals.”

“Nah, it’s different for me. I can tell. It’s a grudge, man. It’s Flower leaving. It’s playoffs. It’s…” 

“Your rival awesome hair?” Rusty suggested. “He might not be Best-in-Show anymore.”

Matt huffed a laugh. “Yeah. That must be it.” There was never much point talking shit with Rusty. His relentless optimism and humor sucked most of the satisfaction out of it. Which made Matt want to be a better person and talk less shit so Rusty didn’t have to do the work of finding humor in it.

So he let the Tanger thing go as they walked to his car, but Rusty had his back like always.

“Maybe you just need to find your thing with him. Like he and Dumo have. That partnership doesn’t seem like it should work. But it does because Dumo found their thing. Maybe ask Dumo what their thing is.”

Matt shook his head. “If it’s their thing, I don’t want to know what it is,” he answered.

But after saying goodbye to Rusty, Matt thought about what he’s said on the drive home. Matt didn’t feel any particular compulsion to be liked. He didn’t need it the way he was pretty sure Rusty did. As long as Matt had his shit together, the guys could think whatever they wanted about him. Goalies lived in their own heads, and Matt was no different. He knew that about himself. But Tanger was…he wasn’t just one of the guys. Matt had to trust all his D, and they had to trust him, and that meant he had to do some work to connect with the guys in front of him. Rudy was easy. Schultzy and Olli were easy. Dumo was the easiest. 

Tanger was…older. And in charge. And hotter.

How was Matt supposed to connect with that when he was still…himself? Less acne and a better sense of his own style, but still weedy. Not a rookie but not established like Flower had been. Not like Flower at all. That was the crux of it.

As he tried to nap, though, before the game that night, he decided that was how he had to deal with this, too.

*

Though he should have gone in with a plan. Something more specific than “a post-win thing.”

It was only the preseason, but a win was a win, so skating toward Tanger where he waited by the tunnel, heart in his throat, Matt lifted his glove hand. It wasn’t…technically Tanger and Flower’s thing, but when his eyes locked with Tanger’s, he knew he’d made a mistake. Kris looked between Matt’s glove and his face and then back, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His eyebrows sloped down and pinched into a familiar expression.

“No,” he said.

And Matt flushed hot, anger burning out any embarrassment that might have been building. “You know, you can fuck off. I’m not him. I don’t have to be him.”

“Then why are you trying so hard?” Tanger snapped. 

Matt stared him down, heart thundering in his ears. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

“No?” Kris gave him a mocking smirk. He looked Matt up and down, then bit his lip, some cruel judgment about to spill out. Sweat dripped from the ends of his hair, and Matt thought he might pass out from the heat of his own pads and uniform. 

“You wanna go in back and see where we get?”

“What?” Matt asked. He blinked.

“I don’t want a handshake,” Tanger said like Matt was slow. “Let’s fuck instead and see where we get.”

“Jesus,” Matt huffed. He searched Kris’s face, looking for a joke, for the cutting words that would make a mockery of Matt’s effort and his feelings. Kris looked at him the way he always did, but he only waited. “Yeah, all right,” Matt finally said, daring him to rescind the offer. “Let’s fucking go.”

Tanger did not rescind the offer—he grinned.

*

It wasn’t weird for guys to do this. It was an emotional game—ask anyone. Sometimes this was the best way to work your shit out. Matt didn’t make a habit of it, though the few times he’d come back here with a teammate had been memorable. 

He and Kris were stripped to their under layers, and Matt braced for the intensity of Kris’s emotions. He expected to be grabbed, maybe shoved against a wall. He tried to decide if he wanted that and failed before Tanger shut the door behind them—and dropped to his knees. 

The room had a double bed, with only a fitted sheet and a stack of towels, but Kris reached for Matt’s hips and didn’t seem to care that they hadn’t made it more than three steps into the room. “Come here,” he said to Matt’s dick, tugging down his sweats and nuzzling in close, though Matt wasn’t hard yet. Kris put both hands on Matt’s ass and squeezed, pulled his cheeks apart and dug his fingers in.

“Shit,” Matt grunted, then gasped as Kris nosed along his lower abdomen and sucked him down. Kris took his soft dick all the way in, an intimate gesture that had Matt feeling unexpectedly held and exposed at the same time. He felt marooned here in the middle of the floor with nothing to grab onto except Kris. So he did that. When Kris swallowed around the head of his dick, Matt unlocked his knees and buckled forward to grip Kris’s gigantic shoulders in both hands. He wasn’t soft now, fuck.

Kris moaned. His hips worked against nothing, grinding air, and Matt’s stuttered in sympathy against—remarkably—Kris’s mouth. He was fucking Kris’s mouth. Not a turn of events he’d foreseen on his way to work today. He figured he had another thirty seconds before that knowledge overloaded his brain and embarrassed the shit out of him. 

To distract himself, he dug his fingers into Kris’s hair. It was just as silky-soft as it looked, but when he tugged on it, his plan backfired. Kris groaned, and the vibration of his voice went straight to Matt’s balls. That moment of fantastic pressure froze his tongue. He managed a short sound, and that was all the warning Kris got before Matt came down his throat. 

Kris swallowed like a champ, his hands kneading from Matt’s ass up to his lower back until he’d sucked every drop out of him. Then he let Matt’s softening cock slip from his mouth and latched onto his hip instead. He bit down on the muscle and sucked hard enough Matt knew he’d have a bruise there by the end of the night.

“Shit,” he said again, breathless and on the verge of laughter.

“My turn,” Tanger said, rough-voiced. He pressed to his feet with a grunt, and they stood together for a moment, Matt’s brain still too slow to string together a sentence. He toyed with the idea of kissing Kris in lieu of a thank-you but let it go. That wasn’t what this room was for.

“Bed?” Kris asked when Matt had said nothing. 

“Sure,” he managed. Tucking himself back into his sweats, he followed Kris and knelt up with him. He hesitated for a moment before grabbing the hem of Kris’s shirt. He wanted to see skin and drag his fingers through that trail of hair down Tanger’s stomach. 

Kris seemed to want it too. He shrugged out of his shirt and with a grin, lifted his hips to strip out of his spandex. Matt had to peel them down, and for a moment it was like one of those cinematic moments, taking off a woman’s stocking. Except this was both legs at once, and as a reward he got a face full of Tanger’s hairy junk. Sometimes he came back from summer waxed clean, but this was not one of those Septembers. 

He met Kris’s gaze just long enough to get a quick nod from him and reached up to open the cabinet by the bed. Lubricant, condoms, and tissues were stocked inside, and he grabbed a handful of the lube packets before dropping back onto his heels. He wedged his knees wide beneath Kris’s thighs and tore open one of the packets with his teeth.

Pillowing his head on the bulk of his left arm, Kris regarded Matt with what felt like trust as Matt dripped lube onto his fingers and smeared it around. And that’s what this was all about—Kris trusted him with his dick down his throat. He was trusting Matt to get him off now. 

“Make it good, Matty.” He said it like a challenge.

And Matt wasn’t sure he liked Tanger calling him _Matty_ any more than he did Cully, but he had to pick his battles. And stay focused. 

When he wrapped his hand around Kris and felt every inch of him in his slick grip, Matt planned to win this one. 

*

He was hard again by the time Kris groaned and sweated through his orgasm, Matt’s first two fingers in him, tugging at his rim, and his other hand wrapped tight around his cock. It was all he could do not to slide his fingers free and bury himself inside. Not to fuck, but to feel like he had in Kris’s mouth. Held and vulnerable all at once.

Instead he absorbed the details of Kris’s nakedness—the strength in his arm as he braced one hand above his head to press down onto Matt’s hand, the dampness of his underarm, and the powerful flex of his abdomen as he spurted across his stomach. Matt tried to swallow, but his throat had gone dry. He’d always thought it, but he knew it for sure now. Tanger was fucking beautiful. 

And Tanger knew it too, of course, when he finally went boneless against the sheet and rubbed his face against the inside of his arm. He trailed his fingers down his chest and into the spunk on his stomach. “Impressive,” he said. His gaze stuck between Matt’s legs, and his mouth twitched. “You can go again, if you want. On me.”

Matt wanted. Hand sticky, he smeared more of Kris’s cum across his palm and jerked off with rough, clumsy strokes, wrapping his free arm around Tanger’s drawn-up leg and holding their bodies close until it was over for good and he rested his sweaty forehead against Tanger’s knee to catch his breath. 

Kris snagged him in a quick look that Matt didn’t know how to interpret. Turned out it was an invitation, though, as he jerked his chin up and opened his arm so Matt could lie against his side. 

“You do this with all your d-partners?” Matt mumbled, stupid from coming twice in like thirty minutes. His hands hummed, and he was too sleepy to be embarrassed.

Kris snorted and didn’t answer.

“With Dumo, anyway? Is this your thing?”

“My thing?”

“Is this how you’re so good together? You know, your thing.” He hadn’t wanted to know, but he kind of really did now. 

Kris huffed an amused sound but shook his head. “Nah, he just likes me a lot.”

Matt slid him a look of deep skepticism, and Kris rolled his eyes. “And I’m crazy about the kid too, obviously. This doesn’t really come into it.” He gestured at the room.

“Then why did you want to with me?” Matt hesitated. “I was pretty sure you hated my guts.”

Tanger’s eyebrows did their thing. “Why would you think that I hate your guts?”

“Geez, I don’t know, maybe because Flower and playoffs and last season sucking and—come on, the way you look at me sometimes… It’s not an indication that you wanted to do this.”

“That’s just my face!” Kris said defensively. “I can’t help if I look how I look.”

A short laugh burst from Matt’s chest. Fucking hell, maybe Rusty was right. And Matt would have to tell him. _His_ face was too honest to lie to. Though— “Really? Not at all?”

Kris snorted. And got a little shifty for a second. “You’re fun to fuck with sometimes. It helps to feel better about some of my own shit.”

“It’s not fun for me.”

Kris’s mouth tightened, and fuck. Matt had just violated the first rule of locker room communication— _Thou shalt give to thy teammates mountains of shit._ He thought he knew the difference between shit-talk and genuine shittiness, but with Tanger the line could be difficult to find. If it was just his face, though, and none of it was genuine shittiness, that helped some. He supposed.

“Yeah,” Tanger said, his tone considering. “I get that.”

“I know I can’t replace Flower,” Matt said. “But I still want you and me to have a thing. Like, I get we can’t force it—”

“What do you think this is? Nothing?” Tanger asked, gesturing at the gross state of his stomach. He was stark naked and Matt had all his clothes on. “You think I sucked your dick for no reason?”

Matt shrugged. “I don’t know man, why not? That’s why I asked you.”

Rolling his eyes like Matt was an obnoxious ref, Kris shifted over onto him. His weight pushed the breath out of him, even when he braced on both arms to look Matt in the eye. 

“I miss my best friend, yeah. We used to do this sometimes, but then we got too fucked up over everything that was happening. So I miss him. I miss this. I like you. That’s it.”

Matt felt his eyebrows shoot up and tried to keep them where they belonged on his face. He just managed not to parrot back, _You like me?_ to Kris, but he may as well have, because Kris got that shifty look again.

“Also, you’re funny, and you have good hair, and I like your style. And we don’t have to talk about this anymore, right?” 

Matt nodded. “That’s fine, yeah.” He thought seriously again about kissing him but decided to save it for next time, since it looked like there could be one of those. At least one. 

“I guess,” Matt added carefully, “if you like me that much, it’s fine if you give me shit with the guys. You know, if it helps you with your own—”

“Man, fuck off,” Tanger laughed. “I’ll give you shit.” Leaning back just enough, he grabbed the loose fabric of Matt’s shirt and scrubbed it across his stomach and chest before leaping off the bed.

“Fucking gross.” Matt laughed with him and hustled to follow him to the showers.

*

After their first regular season win, Matt thunked his helmet against Sid’s and swatted his arm. 

“Nice one, Murr,” Sid told him.

Over by the gate, Tanger waited with his brand-new A and a strange look in his eye. Matt approached warily and jolted when Kris turned his body away from the camera guy on the ice and nudged his arm snuggly along Matt’s. Then he did a weird, wiggly thing with his hand inside his glove. He did it until Matt finally got the idea and lifted his own glove to do it too. 

Kris looked up at him through his visor. He shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll work on it, eh?”

Matt nodded, trying his damnedest not to grin. “Yeah, we’ve got some time.”


End file.
